Jose Altuve, Baseball’s Unlikeliest Superstar

The 5-foot-6-inch Houston Astros second baseman and American League MVP frontrunner is one of the greatest anomalies in the sport’s history.

The Houston Astros second baseman Jose Altuve hits a solo home run during the fifth inning against the Boston Red Sox in game one of the 2017 ALDS playoff baseball series at Minute Maid Park.Troy Taormina / USA TODAY Sports / Reuters

Part of baseball’s charm is the everyman nature of its players. Though some stars are the types of muscular super-humans who populate sports like football and basketball, others are lanky, beer-bellied, stocky, or short. The leading man of your favorite team may possess talent you can barely fathom, but he also might be visibly indistinguishable from the guy next door.

Even so, baseball players like Jose Altuve are simply not supposed to exist.

Altuve, the Houston Astros’s 27-year-old second baseman, is the shortest player in baseball, listed at 5 feet 6 inches and sometimes presumed to be even smaller. He is also the frontrunner for the American League MVP award, fresh off a season in which he won his third AL batting title in four years and led the league in Baseball-Reference’s player value metric, wins above replacement. And in Game 1 of the AL Division Series against the Red Sox on Thursday, Altuve showed why he might be the best player in the MLB postseason, homering three times in an 8-2 Astros win.

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Altuve was once a long-shot to become a professional baseball player, let alone a superstar. As a teenager in Venezuela, he was cut from an Astros tryout because the organization considered him too short. According to a 2014 Sports Illustrated profile, Altuve’s father coaxed him to return to the next tryout, where he earned his way into a deal with Houston and a signing bonus of $15,000, a small fraction of what the top amateurs typically receive.

From there, Altuve hit his way through the Astros’s minor-league system, putting up impressive numbers to little acclaim. Despite posting a .327 batting average and a .867 on-base plus slugging in five minor-league seasons, he was never named to a top-100 prospect list on any prominent site. Even when Altuve reached the Major Leagues and kept hitting, he was regularly written off as a role player at best or a fluke at worst. Optimists compared him to David Eckstein, another diminutive infielder who was lauded more for his grit and scrappiness than for his talent or production.

But by 2014, his third full season in the Majors, Altuve had risen to become one of the best players in the league, a slap-hitting, bag-swiping dynamo who led the AL in batting average, hits, and stolen bases, while winning his first Silver Slugger award. He had seemingly reached his full potential, as a feisty hitter in the Ichiro or Tony Gwynn mold. Then the most improbable thing of all happened: The 5-foot-6-inch Altuve became a formidable power threat. The spike began in 2015, when he started hitting the ball in the air more often, saw his home run/fly ball rate double, and wound up with 15 long balls, more than twice his total from a season ago. In 2016, that surge accelerated, as Altuve doubled his home run/fly ball rate again and belted 24 homers. This year, he launched another 24.

Though sudden home-run spikes sometimes signal a coming regression, Altuve’s gradual slugging gains suggest he has tapped a level of power he couldn’t access before. Tellingly, MLB’s Statcast technology reveals he hit the ball squarely in 2017 nearly twice as often as he did in 2015. Home runs will never be Altuve’s primary weapon, but he nonetheless racked up more this year than sluggers like Albert Pujols, Hanley Ramirez, Robinson Cano, and Mark Trumbo. And thanks to that newfound power, plus a steady diet of doubles, he ranked sixth in the AL in slugging percentage, a stat usually dominated by 230-pound behemoths. His performance Thursday against the Red Sox—when he submitted only the ninth three-homer game in postseason history—was impressive but not surprising to anyone who had been following his season.

If Altuve does win AL MVP next month, he will be one of the least likely honorees in recent history. As unpredictable as baseball-player development can be, most of the best athletes were still either top draft picks or big-money international signees. Take the last eight AL MVPs, for example:

Over the last 12 years, 21 of the 24 MVP awards across the American and National Leagues have gone to players who were either drafted in the first five rounds or offered a seven-figure signing bonus as international free agents. The other three went to Albert Pujols, an overlooked 13th rounder who was embraced as a top prospect almost immediately upon arriving in pro ball. To find an MVP with as surprising a path to stardom as Altuve, you have to go back at least to 2004 AL MVP Vladimir Guerrero, who signed for $2,500 out of the Dominican Republic in 1993.

That Altuve has added power midway through his career is a testament to his rigorous preparation as well as his conditioning.

Altuve is great by any standard, but it’s his height that has inspired internet memes and even a system of measurement, while also making him one of the most anomalous players of the modern era. As an undersized second baseman, Altuve is sometimes compared to the Red Sox star Dustin Pedroia (whom he’s facing in the Division Series) but Pedroia is listed at a comparably towering 5 feet 9 inches. Famously small players like Craig Biggio, Jimmy Rollins, and Joe Morgan are all bigger than Altuve. The only real precedent for a player of similar height being this good comes from the days when nutrition meant a postgame beer. Hall of Famer Phil Rizzuto, who retired in 1956, stood at 5 feet 6 inches, but then again, he never had a season as productive offensively as Altuve’s 2017 campaign. The last MVP Altuve’s height or shorter was the pitcher Bobby Shantz in 1952, but he was a one-year wonder more than a reliable superstar. Hack Wilson, a 5-foot-6 slugger who starred in the 1920s, put up some gaudy stats at the plate but wasn’t the all-around player Altuve is.

When I asked the official Major League Baseball historian John Thorn who was the last player 5 feet 6 inches or under as good as Altuve, he bandied about a few names but couldn’t come up with anyone in the last 100 years who could definitively match the Astros second baseman. Altuve might be the best player of shorter stature since the 5-foot-4-inch “Wee Willie” Keeler, a turn-of-the-20th-century outfielder. Keeler was most famous for perfecting the “Baltimore chop,” a ball hit directly downward that bounces so high that the speedy batter can beat it out for a single. He hit only 33 home runs in his entire 19-year career.

So, how is Altuve so good? Well he rarely swings and misses, his elite speed allows him to beat out infield singles and leg out extra-base hits, and he is one of the best bunters in baseball. That he has added power midway through his career is a testament to his rigorous preparation—which friend and mentor Victor Martinez once called “unbelievable”—as well as his conditioning.

There’s an obvious irony to the fact that Altuve’s chief rival for this year’s MVP award is the 6-foot-7-inch, 280-pound Yankees outfielder Aaron Judge, one of the largest position players in baseball history. In July, a photo of Altuve and Judge standing side by side went viral due to the sheer absurdity of their mutual existence. How can two men of such drastically different size play—and excel at—the same game? It’s a testament both to baseball’s nature and to Altuve’s exceptional persistence. In some sports, tiny players are curiosities or cute stories. In baseball, a short player can claim three batting titles, whack three home runs in a playoff game, and potentially win his league’s highest honor. Almost no one saw Jose Altuve coming, but as of Thursday afternoon, everyone knows he’s here.

In the landscape where Mad Max: Fury Road was filmed, a scientist is trying to understand a natural phenomenon that has eluded explanation for decades.

One evening earlier this spring, German naturalist Norbert Jürgens strayed from his expedition in the Namib Desert. He walked away from his campsite beside Leopard Rock, a huge pile of schist slabs stacked like left-over roofing tiles, and into a vast plain ringed with red-burnished hills. He had 20 minutes of light left before sunset, and he intended to use them.

This next part may sound like a reenactment from a nature documentary, but trust me: This is how it went down.

Off by himself, Jürgens dropped down to his knees. He sank his well-tanned arms in the sand up to the elbows. As he rooted around, he told me later, he had a revelation.

At the time, I was watching from the top of Leopard Rock, which offered a bird’s-eye view of both Jürgens and his expedition’s quarry. Across the plain, seemingly stamped into its dry, stubbly grass, were circles of bare ground, each about the size of an aboveground pool. Jürgens, a professor at the University of Hamburg, was digging—and pondering—in one of these bare patches.

The class divide is already toxic, and is fast becoming unbridgeable. You’re probably part of the problem.

1. The Aristocracy Is Dead …

For about a week every year in my childhood, I was a member of one of America’s fading aristocracies. Sometimes around Christmas, more often on the Fourth of July, my family would take up residence at one of my grandparents’ country clubs in Chicago, Palm Beach, or Asheville, North Carolina. The breakfast buffets were magnificent, and Grandfather was a jovial host, always ready with a familiar story, rarely missing an opportunity for gentle instruction on proper club etiquette. At the age of 11 or 12, I gathered from him, between his puffs of cigar smoke, that we owed our weeks of plenty to Great-Grandfather, Colonel Robert W. Stewart, a Rough Rider with Teddy Roosevelt who made his fortune as the chairman of Standard Oil of Indiana in the 1920s. I was also given to understand that, for reasons traceable to some ancient and incomprehensible dispute, the Rockefellers were the mortal enemies of our clan.

The 9-year-old has built a huge following with profane Instagram posts, but the bravado of “the youngest flexer of the century” masks a sadder tale about fame and exploitation.

In mid-February, a mysterious 9-year-old by the name of Lil Tay began blowing up on Instagram.

“This is a message to all y’all broke-ass haters, y’all ain't doing it like Lil Tay,” she shouts as she hops into a red Mercedes, hands full of wads of cash. “This is why all y’all fucking haters hate me, bitch. This shit cost me $200,000. I’m only 9 years old. I don’t got no license, but I still drive this sports car, bitch. Your favorite rapper ain’t even doing it like Lil Tay.”

Referring to herself as “the youngest flexer of the century,” Lil Tay quickly garnered a fan base of millions, including big name YouTubers who saw an opportunity to capitalize on her wild persona. In late January, RiceGum, an extremely influential YouTube personality dedicated an entire roast video to Lil Tay.

The text reflected not only the president’s signature syntax, but also the clash between his desire for credit and his intuition to walk away.

Donald Trump’s approach to North Korea has always been an intensely personal one—the president contended that his sheer force of will and negotiating prowess would win the day, and rather than use intermediaries, he planned for a face-to-face meeting, with himself and Kim Jong Un on either side of a table.

So Trump’s notice on Thursday that he was canceling the June 12 summit in Singapore was fitting. It arrived in the form of a letter that appears to have been written by the president himself. The missive features a Trumpian mix of non sequiturs, braggadocio, insults, flattery, and half-truths. Whether the dramatic letter marks the end of the current process or is simply a negotiating feint, it matches the soap-operatic series of events that preceded it. Either way, it displays the ongoing conflict between Trump’s desire for pageantry and credit and his longstanding dictum that one must be willing to walk away from the negotiating table.

The Americans and the North Koreans were all set for a historic meeting. Then they started talking about Libya.

Of all the countries that might have acted as a spoiler for the summit in Singapore between Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un—China, Russia, Japan, the United States and North Korea themselves—the one that doomed it was unexpected. It isn’t even involved in North Korea diplomacy and is locateda long 6,000 miles away from the Korean Peninsula. It’s Libya.

Yet Libya ought to have been top of mind. It’s notoriously difficult to determine what motivates the strategic choices and polices of North Korea’s leaders, but among the factors that has been evident for some time is Kim Jong Un’s fear of ending up like Muammar al-Qaddafi. The Libyan strongman was pulled from a drainage pipe and shot to death by his own people following a U.S.-led military intervention during the Arab Spring in 2011. The North Korean government views its development of nuclear weapons—a pursuit Qaddafi abandoned in the early 2000s, when his nuclear program was far less advanced than North Korea’s, in exchange for the easing of sanctions and other promised benefits—as its most reliable shield against a hostile United States that could very easily inflict a similar fate on Kim. We know this because the North Korean government has repeatedly said as much. “The Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq and the Gaddafi regime in Libya could not escape the fate of destruction after being deprived of their foundations for nuclear development and giving up nuclear programs of their own accord,” the state-run Korean Central News Agency observed in 2016.